The Crime

The events of August 4th, 1892 are fairly-well documented, as best as they can be, by eyewitness accounts, police reports and the testimonies taken at the official criminal proceedings. These include an inquest, the preliminary hearing, the grand jury proceedings and the criminal trial of Lizzie A. Borden. Despite some discrepancies that are perhaps inevitable given the number of people involved, the complexity of their interactions, and the imperfect memories of those testifying, there is a comforting amount of alignment to the accounts. The trial testimonies of Bridget Sullivan and John V. Morse, the two other living people to have been present in the house that morning before the murders, do little to contradict each other. Similarly, the stories told by individuals such as Alice Russell, Mrs. Churchill, Dr. Bowen, various police officers, the Assistant Marshal, the Deputy Sheriff, the newspaper reporters, detectives, and Emma Borden, all paint a picture that is contradicted only by Lizzie Borden's confusing statements and poor performance at the inquest. In short, everyone seems to be telling the same story, except for Lizzie.



The morning began at roughly six o'clock a.m., when Bridget Sullivan, the household domestic, and John V. Morse, Lizzie's uncle, arose. Bridget headed downstairs to get fuel for the kitchen stove. She also unlocked the side door of the house and took in the milk left at an early hour by the dairy's delivery man. Morse descended to the sitting room to relax and to wait for his hosts. Oddly enough, Bridget and Morse did not see or hear each other, despite being separated by only a door between the sitting room and the kitchen.

Andrew and Abby Borden soon came down from the master bedroom and prepared to have breakfast with their guest. The meal, which started at approximately seven o'clock, consisted of coffee, Johnny cakes, bananas, molasses cookies, and mutton with mutton broth. The meat had been left over from a previous day's meal and was being continually recycled. Bridget, who had not felt ill up to this point (unlike other members of the household), suddenly experienced a headache and nausea. The Bordens ate their meal, one that Morse testified was "not stingy," but hearty enough. The left-over mutton itself may, in fact, have been the cause of the mysterious illness experienced by the family in the preceding days, although the Bordens did have an icebox and the meat may have been stored properly.

After breakfast, the Bordens and Morse retired to the sitting room where they chatted for approximately an hour. Mr. Borden occasionally disappeared into the kitchen; Mrs. Borden took several trips into the front of the house, flicking a feather duster. By this point, no one had seen Lizzie.

Morse heard from Andrew that his niece and nephew from out west were in town and visiting at a relative's house on Weybosset Street. John made the decision to go visit them before dinner, a choice that removed him from the house during the time of the murders and gave him an airtight alibi. At approximately 8:45 a.m., Andrew walked John to the screen door off the kitchen, first making him promise to come back to have dinner with them, and then letting him out, hooking the screen door after him.

After Morse left, Lizzie Borden came down the front stairs and told Bridget that she was not very hungry, but would, when ready, get some breakfast for herself. Mr. Borden, after cleaning his teeth in the kitchen sink, headed upstairs, while Bridget, not feeling well, went out into the back yard and began to vomit. She remained out there for quite some time, presumably waiting for her nausea to pass. During this time, Andrew Borden had left the house for his walk downtown. When Bridget came back inside, Abby Borden told her to go about washing the first floor windows, both inside and out. Then Abby went upstairs by way of the front hall to put some finishing touches on the guest room. This was roughly at half-past nine.

At this point, Bridget left the house by way of the side door, telling Lizzie that she need not lock the door since she would be going in and out to fetch water for her window cleaning. She then went to the barn to get her cleaning materials, effectively leaving Lizzie and Abby Borden alone in the house together. Abby was at this point upstairs in the guest room, where she would later be found murdered. If one subscribes to the school of thought that Lizzie Borden is guilty, this would have been her prime moment of opportunity, since Bridget spent much of the hour between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m. outside the house. Bridget even stopped at the south fence of the property to chat with a domestic girl from the Kelly house before she began washing the sitting-room windows. If a killer had slipped into the house through the side door off the kitchen to dispatch Abby Borden while Bridget was either chatting with the Kelly girl or cleaning the sitting-room windows, Bridget would not have seen anything.

Based on many eyewitness accounts, Mr. Borden made a loop around downtown Fall River, stopping into three banks on North Main Street, and chatting with one of his tenants. He also visited one of his properties on South Main Street where some construction work was going. He was not looking very well, and perhaps that hour's walk was all he could undertake that morning. Andrew hooked back onto Second Street by way of Spring Street, and approached his home from the south. He tried to enter by way of the side screen door, but found it to be hooked shut. He then he walked to the front of the house, and tried to enter the main door with his own key. However, he had trouble with the door's locks, and so knocked on the door.

His knocking interrupted Bridget as she was washing the inside of the windows in the sitting-room, and she hurried to the door to let him in. She struggled with the lock herself, and gave a little explicit curse to express her frustration. At that moment, she heard Lizzie Borden giggle at her faux pas from the top of the front stairs. This was a critical moment in the events' timeline, since it places Lizzie at the top of the stairs, just a few yards away from the-then dead body of Abby Borden. During the inquest, much was been made over the question of whether Lizzie was upstairs or downstairs at the time of her father's arrival back at the house, and Lizzie's confusing and contradictory testimony does little to improve our understanding of her whereabouts. However, Bridget clearly recalled that she heard a giggle and swore under oath that it was Lizzie Borden standing at the top of the stairs. Either way, even if Lizzie were at the top of the stairs, her line of site of Abby's body would have been obstructed by the guest room bed, as determined by many in countless experiments at the crime scene.

Mr. Borden entered the house, and, shortly thereafter, Lizzie Borden appeared to ask him whether there was any mail for her down at the post office. Andrew replied that there was not, then asked her where Abby was. Lizzie told him that Abby had received a note that someone was ill and that she had left the house. This was an explanation that Lizzie was to repeat throughout the afternoon, and quite possibly a blatant lie. If Lizzie were guilty, she obviously knew by this point that Abby was dead and was no doubt trying to prevent Andrew from looking for his wife until she could murder him as well. If she were innocent, then her account of the purported note being received by Abby from a sick friend is a great mystery: no such note was ever found, no one ever came forward as the author of the note, and it is highly unlikely that Abby had left the house between the time she ascended the front stairs to clean the guest room and the discovery of her dead body at roughly 11:30am.

As Bridget proceeded to clean the inside windows in the dining room, Mr. Borden went upstairs to his room, came down again, and then went to relax in the sitting-room. Bridget testified that Lizzie helped him into a comfortable position on the sitting room sofa. Lizzie herself testified that she saw Andrew remove his congress boots and put on slippers; yet in the crime scene photograph of Andrew's body, the boots are clearly on his feet, another example of Lizzie self-contradictory, and therefore self-incriminating, statements.

After Mr. Borden was prone on the sofa, perhaps recovering from the exertion of his walk and the lingering symptoms of his illness, Lizzie went to iron some handkerchiefs in the dining room. She chatted with Bridget and told her of a clothing sale at a nearby department store, encouraging her to leave the house and check out the sale. Although Bridget expressed interest in going to the sale, she instead opted to put away her window-washing materials, and head upstairs to take a nap in her third- floor bedroom. This effectively left Lizzie alone on the first floor with her sleeping father.

According to Lizzie, she noted that her iron flats were not sufficiently hot, so she put them on the stove and then left for the barn to look for something. She gave differing accounts of what exactly it was that she was looking for, and how much time she spent there. She said that she had taken some pears from the yard to eat while in the barn and that she was looking for some iron to fix a door and/or some lead sinkers for fishing; she also claimed that she was either in the barn twenty minutes or thirty minutes, because she "couldn't do anything in a minute." It is more likely, if she went to the barn at all, that it was for only about ten minutes, between 10:55 and 11:05 a.m., and that she was just trying to kill some time while the flats heated on the stove.

Either way, shortly after 11:00 a.m., Bridget Sullivan was resting in her bed. She had heard the bells of City Hall chime the hour. Shortly after that, how many minutes she could not say exactly, she heard Lizzie Borden calling her from up the stairs. "Maggie, come quick! Father is dead! Someone has come in and killed him!" (Note: Lizzie insisted on calling Bridget by the name Maggie, presumably because a previous maid had been called by that name).

According to the account in which Lizzie was to finally settle, she had come back into the house from the barn, had placed her hat down on the dining room table, and had walked into the sitting room to check on her father. There she found him dead on the sofa, his head mutilated by a bladed instrument. The blood was still flowing from his wounds, his eyeball was cut in half, and his face was unrecognizable.

If Lizzie Borden were guilty, she would have had those few moments before alerting Bridget to cover up the evidence of her crime. This would have included the changing of her dress which would likely have been splattered with blood, and getting rid of the murder weapon itself. But there was precious little time for Lizzie Borden to have engaged in either activity.

The alarm had now sounded, and the world was about to play witness to a very deep mystery.